There are a variety of uses for remotely operated vehicles including military, industrial and entertainment/recreation applications. For entertainment/recreation applications, remotely operated model airplanes, helicopters, automobiles, ships and sail boats are well known. In an industrial application, it is well known to use a remotely operated vehicle to complete high risk or difficult tasks such as inspection, maintenance and repair in a high radiation area, exploration of extreme water depths, and airborne surveillance.
Within the military spectrum, there has been a recent resurgence in the interest in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for performing a variety of missions where the use of manned flight vehicles is not deemed appropriate, for whatever reason. Such missions include surveillance, recognizance, target acquisition and/or designation, data acquisition, communication data linking, decoy, jamming, harassment, or one way supply flights. Similarly, it has long been the practice of remotely controlling torpedo's for underwater delivery of ordinance.
An obvious difference between a manned and remotely operated vehicle relates to the control or pilotage of the vehicle. In a manned vehicle, the operator sits within the vehicle and inputs control signals related to the desired vehicle response. In such a case, all requests by the vehicle operator are based on a vehicle frame of reference. For example, in an aircraft, control requests are typically input by a pilot via a control stick. If the pilot wishes to move the aircraft forward, he inputs a forward movement of the control stick, which pitches the aircraft in the forward direction. Similarly, if the pilot wishes to move the aircraft to the right, he inputs a right lateral stick motion which, in turn, rolls the aircraft to the right.
A problem associated with operating remotely operated vehicles is that when the vehicle operator controls the vehicle from a distant location, commands referenced to the operator's body or operator frame of reference may result in undesired vehicle motion. Typically, the motion of a remotely operated vehicle is governed by the direction in which a fixed reference point or axis on the vehicle is pointing, e.g., the direction that the vehicle nose or front is pointing. Referring to the example of FIG. 1, if the vehicle operator 10 and the vehicle 12 have the same forward orientation or frame of reference, then control inputs by the vehicle operator 10 will result in a corresponding change in vehicle motion, e.g., if the vehicle operator commands a right motion of the vehicle, the vehicle 12 will move/turn to the right. However, as shown in the example of FIG. 2, if the vehicle is moving towards the vehicle operator 10 then a control input by the vehicle operator will result in opposite motion of the vehicle, e.g., if the vehicle operator commands a right motion of the vehicle, the vehicle will actually move/turn left with respect to the vehicle operator.
Therefore, existing methods for controlling remotely operated vehicles rely greatly on operator skill. With a considerable amount of training, an operator can learn to operate a remotely operated vehicle proficiently in most spatial relationships of the vehicle with respect to the operator. However, under high workload and stress conditions, the non-intuitive control of a remotely operated vehicle may result in inadvertent and unwanted motion of the remotely operated vehicle.